Thoughts on the military and military activities of a diverse nature. Free-ranging and eclectic.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Congo!

This is coolbert:

Here is a response to a comment sent into my blog from a devoted reader, JS Bolton.

[Not to be confused with JR Bolton, American Ambassador to the United Nations. The comments of JS Bolton are insightful. This person is welcome!!]

"Another alarming example of illegals taking territory by force is the eastern Congo. Several million people have died there in the last decade as foreigners from Rwanda etc., formed marauding armies. This is said to have occurred mainly from people being pushed, by warfare, into districts which were untenable for normal life expectancy. Drugs were unavailable in such places, while diseases were all the more easily contracted. If competition for sovereignty is what war is about, the encouragement of just that sort of competition from illegal aliens, would seem to be war-promoting in itself."

Yes, the case of the Congo is perhaps even a more glaring and egregious example of how illegal aliens, and ARMIES of marauding illegal aliens can actually take over a nation that possessed it's own sovereignty. Much worse just in terms of dead [in the millions and counting] than the Ivory Coast.

Resources and living space coveted by illegal aliens DO seem to be at the heart of the conflict in the Congo.

And primarily possession of a most valuable resource. COLTAN. The mineral absolutely essential for the micro-electronics industry. Used in the manufacture of tantalum capacitors.

This resource, the coltan, of itself, is NOT something useful to those illegal alien populations.

Is used in trade, but NOT used by the invading alien population themselves.

It is useless to them in the form as it is when taken out of the ground. ONLY when traded [to foreign national middlemen] is it valuable.

To those impressed persons doing very hard pick and shovel panning and mining, using methods as would have been seen in the California Gold Rush of 1849, coltan is an exotic earth of NO use to them.

Is useful to the war lords that sell the coltan on the international market, but not to the indigenous folks that do the hard work of extracting the ore.

Very sad. This situation in the Congo is an enormous step backward in the development of the area. It can be said that the Congo has gone from being a basket case to something worse than that, whatever that is.